Edward Herman, the co-author (with Noam Chomsky) of Manufacturing Consent, has died. He was 92. His work has never been more relevant.

Manufacturing Consent was a kind of bible of media criticism for a generation of dissident thinkers. The book described with great clarity how the system of private commercial media in America cooperates with state power to generate propaganda.

Herman's work was difficult for many to understand because the nature of the American media, then and now, seemed at best to be at an arm's length from, say, the CIA or the State Department. Here is how the book put it:

"It is much more difficult to see a propaganda system at work where the media are private and formal censorship is absent."

The basic thesis of Manufacturing Consent was that propaganda in America is generated through a few key idiosyncrasies of our (mostly private) system.

One is that getting the whole population to buy in to a narrative requires the sustained attention of the greater part of the commercial media, for at least a news cycle or two.

We don't censor the truth in America, mostly. What we do instead is ignore it. If a lone reporter wants to keep banging a drum about something taboo, like contracting corruption in the military, or atrocities abroad, he or she will a) tend not advance in the business, and b) not be picked up by other media.

Therefore the only stories that tended to reach mass audiences were ones in which the basic gist was agreed upon by the editors and news directors of all or most of the major media companies.

In virtually all cases this little mini-oligarchy of media overlords kept the news closely in sync with the official pronouncements of the U.S. government.

The appearance of dissent was permitted in op-ed pages, where Democrats and Republicans "debated" things. But what readers encountered in these places was a highly ritualized, artificially narrow form of argument kept strictly within a range of acceptable opinions.

Herman and Chomsky stressed the concept of worthy and unworthy victims. In Manufacturing Consent, written during the Cold War, the idea was expressed thusly: One Polish priest murdered behind the Iron Curtain earned about a hundred times as much coverage as priests shot in Latin America by American-backed dictatorships.

The Polish priest was the worthy victim, the Latin American priests unworthy.

So Americans learned to be furious about atrocities committed in Soviet client states, but blind to almost exactly similar crimes committed within our own spheres of influence.

The really sad part about the Herman/Chomsky thesis was that it didn't rely upon coercion or violence. Newspapers and TV channels portrayed the world in this America-centric way not because they were forced to. Mostly, they were just intellectually lazy and disinterested in the stated mission of their business, i.e., telling the truth.

In fact, media outlets were simply vehicles for conveying ads, and a consistent and un-troubling view of the political universe was a prerequisite for selling cars, candy bars, detergent, etc. Upset people don't buy stuff. This is why Sunday afternoon broadcasts featured golf tournaments and not police beatings or reports from cancer wards near Superfund sites.

The news business was about making money, and making money back then for big media was easy. So why make a fuss?

As a result, the top executives in news agencies were people who were inclined to take official sources as gospel. An additional feature of the business was that the least skeptical reporters were the ones who were promoted the most quickly. And when they got there, reporters manning the top posts were encouraged to develop an almost religious worship of credentialing.

A person with a title, be it someone from a think tank, a university, or especially a security service organ, was to be trusted unquestioningly. Meanwhile, outside/dissenting voices were given the hardcore "skeptical journalist" treatment.

This is how situations like the Iraq War invasion happened, in defiance of all common sense.

Even though a child could see that the government's stated reason for going into Iraq was both insane and a fiction, virtually everyone in the business jumped into the story with both feet.

Round the clock, TV sets were full of current and former generals and/or talking heads from think tanks boosting the war rationale. Antiwar voices were almost totally excluded.

Within the business, those with doubts hesitated to say so in public. Even at the editorial level, this was so, thanks to fear of backlash.

Herman/Chomsky identified that phenomenon in Manufacturing Consent as "flak" - a policing mechanism whereby reporters and/or media outlets that stepped out of line could expect to be denounced by an entire range of establishment voices.

Those voices were usually the same credentialed "experts" who were accustomed to being worshipped in the normal course of coverage.

Flak worked. It scared advertisers, and what scares advertisers scares editors.

In the case of Iraq, fear of being called unpatriotic, a terrorist-lover or "against the troops" cowed most news directors or editors with even remote doubts. And when that didn't work, networks like MSNBC simply yanked disobedient antiwar voices like Phil Donahue and Jesse Ventura.

Through these parallel operations - the pushing of approved narratives on the one hand and the policing and hiding of forbidden ones on the other - this seemingly unconnected federation of competing media companies and establishment spokesfiends "manufactured" public opinion.

There was no dictum from above, the way it might have happened in a tinpot dictatorship or a superpower oligarchy like the Soviet Union.

Public "consent" for policies like the Iraq invasion was manufactured through a complex series of organic processes, then kept in place via a mix of powerful economic and psychological incentives.

Herman was interested in the phenomenon of how even outright fictions could be sold in a "free" media system.

In his last piece, from this past summer, Herman made a list of some of the whoppers the media has foisted on the public over the years: the depiction of the U.S. not as an invader but as a defender of South Vietnam against "aggression," the notion that the Soviets were behind a papal assassination attempt, the "missile gap" and others.

Herman was a skeptic about the current Russia news, but that isn't why his work is relevant today. You can believe he's dead wrong on Russia and Trump, and Manufacturing Consent would still be far more relevant now than it was when he and Chomsky first wrote it.

The main reasons for this have to do with the structure of the current commercial media. Because of tech companies like Google and Facebook, it is significantly easier to "manufacture" consent today than it was before.

A small handful of monopolistic tech companies like Facebook have life-or-death power over media companies. They can steer traffic wherever they please simply by tweaking their algorithms. Firms that don't themselves create news content wield this monstrous influence.

Controlling how, where and when you got the news was how media companies were paid previously. Since those processes are mostly out of their hands now, news companies no longer control their own economic fates.

They have become vassals to essentially unregulated, monopolistic distribution mechanisms like Facebook, who additionally appropriate the lion's share of the profits that used to fund things like investigative journalism.

Moreover the policing mechanisms are far more powerful now. Herman and Chomsky wrote about flak in the era before social media. Today blowback against dissenting thought is instantaneous and massive.

Individual reporters are far more likely to be freaked out about it because Internet trolls are so personal and can rattle just about anyone. Add the proliferation of fake blowback produced by oppo firms and troll farms and it's not an accident that the overwhelming majority of "legacy media" content stays within the confines of conventional blue or red rhetoric.

The major difference between then and now has to do with which narratives are being pushed. When Manufacturing Consent was written the major problem was that Americans across the entire political spectrum were being sold a range of myths about the beneficence of American power and government policy.

Today it is not clear who is actually dictating to whom. Is the state dictating to the media, or are global distribution firms dictating the narrative to states?

We can make a few deductions about the new "manufactured consent." The thrust of modern media isn't as simple as cheerleading for the flag and ignoring atrocities, although we clearly still do that.

There seems also to be a massive emphasis on political division as a route to profit. Since getting people to discuss and argue is how companies like Facebook get paid, driving us toward ever more divisive media is an obvious imperative. But to what end?

Herman and Chomsky's work was a great gift to a generation of thinkers trying to make sense of how power in the West sold itself to populations. The late Herman should be honored for that critical contribution he made to understanding American empire.

It's a shame he never wrote a sequel. Now more than ever, we could use another Manufacturing Consent.
(c) 2017 Matt Taibbi is Rolling Stone's chief political reporter, Matt Taibbi's predecessors include the likes of journalistic giants Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke. Taibbi's 2004 campaign journal Spanking the Donkey cemented his status as an incisive, irreverent, zero-bullshit reporter. His books include Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion, Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire.

I am furious. And I have good reason to be furious.

I was going to write an article about a subject I have been thinking about for a long time.

This week I opened the New York Times and lo, my yet unwritten article appeared on its opinion pages in full, argument after argument.

How come? I have only one explanation: the author - I have forgotten the name - has stolen the ideas from my head by some magical means, which surely must be branded as criminal. A person once tried to kill me for doing the same thing to him.

So I have decided to write this article in spite of everything.

THE SUBJECT is idiocy. Particularly, the role of idiocy in history.

The older I get, the more convinced I am that sheer stupidity plays a major role in the history of nations.

Great Thinkers, compared to whom I am a mere intellectual dwarf, have pursued other factors to explain what has turned history into a mess. Karl Marx blamed the economy. The economy has directed humankind from its earliest beginnings.

Others blame God. Religion has caused awful wars, and still does. Look at the Crusades, which for almost two hundred years raged in my country. Look at the 30-year War which devastated Germany. No end in sight.

Some accuse Race. Whites against Red Indians. Aryans against Untermenschen. Nazis against Jews. Terrible.

Or geopolitics. The White Man's Burden.The Drang-nach-Osten.

For many generations, Great Thinkers have been searching for some deep explanation for war. There must be such an explanation. After all, terrible historical events cannot just happen. There must be something profound, something sinister, which is causing all this untold misery. Something that has accompanied the human race from its very beginnings, and that still directs our destiny.

I HAVE adopted most of these theories in my time. Many of them impressed me very much. Great thinkers. Deep thoughts. I have read many thick volumes. But in the end, they left me unsatisfied.

In the end it hit me. There is indeed one factor common to all these historical events: foolishness.

I know that this sounds incredible. Foolishness? All these thousands of wars? All these hundreds of millions of casualties? All these emperors, kings, statesmen, strategists? All fools?

Recently I was asked for an example. "Show me how it works," an incredulous listener demanded. I mentioned the outbreak of World War I, an event that changed the face of Europe and the world forever, and which ended just five years before I was born, My earliest childhood was spent in the shadow of this cataclysm.

It happened like this:

An Austrian archduke was killed in the town of Sarajevo by a Serbian anarchist. It happened almost by accident: the planned attempt failed, but later the terrorist happened upon the duke and killed him.

So what? The duke was a quite unimportant person. Thousands of such acts have happened before and since. But this time the Austrian statesmen thought that this was a good opportunity to teach the Serbs a lesson. It took the form of an ultimatum.

No big deal. Such things happen all the time. But the powerful Russian empire was allied with Serbia, so the Czar issued a warning: he ordered the mobilization of his army, just to make his point.

In Germany, all the red lights went on. Germany is situated in the middle of Europe and has no impregnable natural borders, no oceans, no high mountains. It was trapped between two great military powers, Russia and France. For years the German generals had been pondering how to save the Fatherland if attacked from the two sides simultaneously.

A master-plan evolved. Russia was a huge country, and it would take several weeks to mobilize the Russian army. These weeks must be used to smash France, turn the army around and stop the Russians.

It was a brilliant plan, worked out to the finest detail by brilliant military minds. But the German army was stopped at the gates of Paris. The British intervened to help France. The result was a static war of four long years, where nothing really happened except that millions upon millions of human beings were slaughtered or maimed.

In the end a peace was made, a peace so stupid that it virtually made a Second World War inevitable. This broke out a mere 21 years later, with even larger numbers of casualties.

MANY BOOKS have been written about "July 1914", the crucial month in which World War I became inevitable.

How many people were involved in decision-making in Europe? How many emperors, kings, ministers, parliamentarians, generals; not to mention academicians, journalists, poets and what not?

Were they all stupid? Were they all blind to what was happening in their countries and throughout their continent?

Impossible, one is tempted to cry out. Many of them were highly competent, intelligent people, people versed in history. They knew everything about the earlier wars that had ravaged Europe throughout the centuries.

Yet there you are. All these people played their part in causing the most terrible war (up to then) in the annals of history. An act of sheer idiocy.

The human mind cannot accept such a truth. There must be other reasons. Profound reasons. So they wrote innumerable books explaining why this was logical, why it had to happen, what were the "underlying" causes.

Most of these theories are certainly plausible. But compared to the effects, they are puny. Millions of human beings marched out to be slaughtered, singing and almost dancing, trusting their emperor, king, president, commander-in-chief. Never to return.

Could all these leaders be idiots? They certainly could. And were.

I DON'T need the examples of the thousands of foreign wars and conflicts, because I live in the middle of one right now.

Never mind how it came about, the present situation is that in the land that used to be called Palestine there live two peoples of different origin, culture, history, religion, language, standard of living and much more. They are now of more or less equal size.

Between these two peoples, a conflict has now been going on for more than a century.

In theory, there are only two reasonable solutions: either the two peoples shall live together as equal citizens in one state, or they shall live side by side in two states.

The third possibility is no solution - eternal conflict, eternal war.

This is so obvious, so simple, that denying it is sheer idiocy.

Living together in one state sounds logical, but is not. It is a recipe for constant conflict and internal war. So there remains only what is called "two states for two peoples".

When I pointed this out, right after the 1948 war, the war in which Israel was founded, I was more or less alone. Now this is a world-wide consensus, everywhere except in Israel.

What is the alternative? There is none. Just going on with the present situation: a colonial state in which 7 million Israeli Jews oppress 7 million Palestinian Arabs. Logic says that this is a situation that cannot go on forever. Sooner or later it will break down.

So what do our leaders say? Nothing. They pretend to be oblivious to this truth.

At the top of the pyramid we have a leader who looks intelligent, who speaks well, who seems competent. In fact, Binyamin Netanyahu is a mediocre politician, without vision, without depth. He does not even pretend that he has another solution. Nor do his colleagues and possible heirs.

The Baltimore police department seems to have learned nothing from the civil disturbances that rocked the city after Freddie Gray died in police custody back in 2015. Six cops got off scot-free for killing Gray -- which seems to have led the police to conclude that they can treat the Black community as a Constitution-Free Zone, where anything the cops do is legal.

Baltimore is 63 percent Black. Its elected officials are mostly Black, and its police force is majority Black and Hispanic. So, what we're seeing in Baltimore is how a plantation operates when the white folks leave the Black overseers in charge. What we find is, the Black Misleadership Class and the Black police are nothing more than servants of white supremacy, and have no respect for the rights of Black citizens.

Last week, a Black police detective was shot to death in the Harlem Park section of west Baltimore. The police declared the entire neighborhood a "crime scene" and locked down every street and sidewalk for blocks around. Residents were patted down, coming and going into the neighborhood, and required to show little pieces of paper from police vouching that they were residents. If you couldn't show you lived in Harlem Park, you couldn't get in, even to visit relatives. Checkpoints were everywhere, and residents were questioned, over and over again, about the identity of the shooter. All this is blatantly unconstitutional - which means, it's a massive police crime against the people. As the local American Civil Liberties Union said, even when police are in "hot pursuit" of a criminal suspect, they cannot treat a whole neighborhood like criminals. Constitutional protections cannot be suspended for the convenience of police investigators. For that, you need a declaration of martial law. When the cops designated all of Harlem Park a crime scene they were, in effect, declaring the neighborhood to be outside the protection of the U.S. Constitution.

To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, a city, or a nation that is partially Constitution-free, cannot stand. From the founding of the United States, to the Dred Scott decision, through a century of Jim Crow injustice, U.S. police forces have treated Black communities as outside the reach of Constitutional law. The so-called War on Drugs saw the designation of large sections of U.S. cities as drug zones, within which everyone was considered suspect, simply by virtue of their presence. In some cities, the entire Black community is located within these designated "drug zones." That means, the Constitution does not exist for Black people in those cities.

Many of these urban areas proudly call themselves "sanctuary cities." Sanctuaries for whom? In Baltimore's Harlem Park, for almost a week, there was no sanctuary from the armed and dangerous gunmen in blue. And, if the cops can take your rights away any time they feel like it, then you never really had those rights at all.

I am coming to believe that Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Lee Sumpter Shiloh Segregation Sessions III is not actually human, but is in fact a subspace anomaly of the Star Trek variety. These anomalies are known to cause irregularities in gravity, ripples in space and alterations in the laws of physics. In short, their very presence makes things weird. Sound about exactly like what's been going on at the Justice Department for the last year, and it just got a whole lot weirder.

Consider: Sessions, an as-advertised racist, misogynist son of the Confederacy, was happily ensconced in what was, by any metric, a lifetime gig as a senator from Alabama. Along came candidate Trump, so Sessions jumped on board and was named attorney general after the strangest presidential election in the history of matter.

There was great rejoicing in white supremacist circles everywhere upon Sessions' appointment, until he abruptly chose to recuse himself from any and all investigations into Trump's dealings with Russia. Trump went berserk with rage upon this seeming betrayal, and has, from time to time since, made it his mission in life to do Sessions harm, in what is nothing, more or less, that yet another expression of the permanent vengeance motive that gets him out of bed every day.

It is worthwhile to note that here, right here, stands one of the tender few moments in Sessions' tenure as attorney general, when he actually, marginally fulfilled the moral requirements of his station. Given his involvement with the campaign, he had no recourse but to recuse himself from all things Russia ... unless he chose to go rogue, fling propriety over the dunes and charge ahead. Like as not, he would have gotten away with it given the current congressional realities, but for whatever reason, he played it straight. In doing so, he deprived Trump of a hole card he'd been counting on, and the presidential wrath in the aftermath has hedged the biblical in scope.

Still left to address was the Alabama Senate seat left open by Sessions' appointment. The GOP rustled up a candidate from central casting named Luther Strange, but the Steve Bannon wing of the party had other ideas, and one of them was a former Alabama state judge named Roy Moore. Moore's wild-eyed, right-wing pedigree has been well documented since he fell on his sword to protect a giant Ten Commandments monument in his courthouse, and since he refused to uphold laws granting equal rights for LGBTQ people because Jesus, or something.

In another short span of time, Moore won the primary to become the GOP's nominee to replace Sessions in the Senate. Then a number of women -- five at this point -- came forward to accuse Moore of sexual misconduct when they were teenagers. Reports began to surface that Moore's taste for young girls was commonly known, and that he'd even been banned from a mall for aggressively pursuing teenagers. Then Moore painted himself as a martyr and victim while his defenders compared his behavior to Joseph, stepdad of Jesus Christ.

When the assault accusations became public, the GOP practically snapped its collective fibulas trying to kick Moore off the ticket, or barring that, find a write-in candidate to challenge him for Republican votes in the December special election ... and just when you thought the quota of weird for this story had been amply filled, along came Sen. Mitch McConnell on Tuesday with a timely suggestion.

As leader of an already-fractious and unmanageable majority, McConnell has a personal vested interest in keeping Moore as far away from the chamber as possible. Sessions, according to McConnell on Tuesday, "fits the mold of somebody who might be able to pull off a write-in. Obviously, it would be a big move for him and for the president."

To recap: Sessions was an Alabama senator, then supported Trump, then became Trump's attorney general, then pissed Trump off with his recusal, then periodically absorbed massive public derision from Trump to the point that he had to insist he wasn't quitting and now the Senate majority leader is floating him as the savior of the GOP by advocating that he return home to defend his old seat from a theocratic fascist facing numerous allegations of sexual violence.

This isn't just some goofy trial balloon, either. According to McConnell, "It's an issue they [Sessions and Trump] are discussing in great detail."

Ladies and gentlemen, the Republican Party.

The truly weird part, the part that leads me to believe Jefferson Beauregard Wallace Pickett Secession Sessions III is actually a spatial anomaly disrupting physics itself, is this: I want him to stay right the hell where he is. Sessions is by far the worst attorney general of my lifetime, perhaps of all time, and folks, that is saying something. He can't leave to save Alabama from itself, but must remain at Justice. Why? Because hard as it may be to accept or believe, all of this can get a whole lot worse.

Before his vapid Asia trip, Trump was making a lot of angry noises about his inability to use the Justice Department to grind down and destroy political enemies and anyone else who annoys him. This was disquieting enough by itself -- the president's manifest disdain for and rank ignorance of the rule of law has reached the level of performance art by now -- but his pre-trip grousing this time made people decidedly more nervous than usual.

To make matters worse, Sessions "ordered senior prosecutors to evaluate various accusations against Hillary Clinton and report back on whether a special counsel should be appointed," according to the New York Times. The items on Trump's investigatory wish list have either been investigated to pieces already, or are little more than fever-dream conspiracies that have oozed from the brain trust at Breitbart.

All of this, of course, is a lot of hyperactive hooey ginned up by the Sean Hannitys of the world to distract and possibly disrupt Robert Mueller's increasingly intense Trump/Russia investigation. By signaling he was interested, Sessions was indicating that he might be on the verge of providing that smokescreen while actively satisfying Trump's worst fascist desires.

If the Justice Department becomes the wrath of Trump, that's pretty much the end of the line for this little constitutional experiment we've been fiddling with since the shootout on the Lexington Green. If Sessions were to let this dog slip the leash, we're done as a nation of laws.

Presidents don't give power back. What is an astonishing power grab for one president becomes the new normal for the next president, and that president's power grab becomes the new normal for the president after them. If Trump is allowed to use the vast powers of the federal justice system to chase his enemies up a tree, the practice will become commonplace under his successor. None of us wants to live in that world. It is the world of boots hammering the floorboards in the dead of night, of star chambers and the disappeared.

These grave concerns took a large step backward on Tuesday afternoon when Sessions testified before the House Intelligence Committee. The hearing was ostensibly about the glaring irregularities within Sessions' own Russia-related testimony, but the conversation veered immediately into the realm of Clinton's emails and Canadian uranium. Several of the committee members had been demanding a new special counsel investigation since July, and they wanted to know if the attorney general was going to pull the trigger.

When GOP Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio said it "looks like" the FBI and the Democratic Party had worked together on the now-infamous Trump/Russia dossier, Sessions replied, "'Looks like' is not enough basis to appoint a special counsel." Later, Sessions told Rep. Jordan, "You can have your idea, but sometimes we have to study what the facts are and to evaluate whether it meets the standard that requires a special counsel." To these ears, it sounded on Tuesday afternoon as if the attorney general was telling everyone yammering about a new special counsel to go back to bed. He did not definitively slam the door on the idea, but he appeared to be about as enthusiastic about it as a cat at bath time. This is welcome news if it holds.

This is why Sessions can't go running back to Alabama. If he leaves his current post, Trump will likely appoint someone to replace him who is more blatantly in line with his authoritarian visions -- someone who could very well authorize hostile politically motivated investigations, and who could also tear up every current investigation into Russia's electoral meddling, including the all-important one being run by Mueller. Jefferson Beauregard Longstreet Dred Scott Dixie Sub-Space Sessions III is terrible by any standard, but never forget: It can always get worse.

Defining worse: Brett Talley of Alabama, who has never in his life tried a single case as an attorney, and who is married to a senior staff attorney for the Trump administration, has been nominated to a lifetime position on the federal bench. His nomination has already passed the Senate Judiciary Committee on a party-line vote, and appears ready to sail through the main body in similar fashion. No one knows anything about this wildly unqualified man, and he's about to have sway over literal life-and-death issues until his own dying day.

This is a feature, not a bug. "Trump judges are getting rushed through the confirmation process at a record pace," reports Eleanor Clift of The Daily Beast, "and they're super conservative on cultural issues, and mostly young. A lifetime appointment for someone in his or her thirties or forties is a gift that keeps on giving for three or four decades."

Why? Because these days it isn't about right or wrong, good or bad, patriotic or otherwise. It's about counting white men's noses, period. On this, the GOP has a tall advantage. Let Sessions leave for Alabama, and some yessir Republican embryo will be planted in Justice to do the Lord's bidding, such as it is.